Angus Taylor has stepped up his attack on migration entitlements, describing migrants as a “net drain” on society and accusing some people of trying to use Australia’s generosity “for self-serving purposes”.

The Coalition figure told Sky News on Friday that “They’re slashing money to veterans at the same time as they’re handing out money to non-citizens” and said there were “substantial savings in all of this” if the government tightened payments to permanent residents. The remarks sharpened a position Taylor has taken since becoming Liberal leader, as he argues for further restrictions on benefits available to people who have not yet become citizens.

The timing matters because Taylor is not making the case in a policy vacuum. Treasury released a paper in late 2021 that modelled the lifetime fiscal impact of Australia’s permanent migration program, and its numbers cut hard against the argument that migrants are a burden on the public purse. The paper said the average migrant across the skilled, family and humanitarian streams pays $41,000 more in tax than they receive in government services over their lifetime, while the average skilled worker visa holder delivers a net lifetime benefit of $198,000.

Those gains are not spread evenly across every visa class. Treasury found family visa holders pay $126,000 less in tax than they receive in services and humanitarian visa holders pay $400,000 less, but it still concluded the permanent migration program generates significant fiscal benefits in aggregate to Australia. The same paper said the average Australian citizen consumes $85,000 more in services than they pay in taxes, meaning the fiscal impact of the average migrant is $127,000 more positive than that of the average citizen.

That is the core contradiction running through Taylor’s argument. He is framing migrants as a cost while Treasury’s own modelling says migrants as a whole contribute more in taxes than they take back in benefits, and that when migrants pay more than they receive it benefits the incumbent Australian population. Alan Gamlen, who criticised the Coalition’s promise to restrict entitlements to permanent residents, called it a solution for a problem that does not exist and said the pitch was “just a kind of slightly nasty opportunism, really, because by and large it’s taxpayers who pay for those benefits and migrants as a whole contribute more in taxes than in benefits”.

There is also a practical angle to the debate. Treasury’s modelling covers skilled, family and humanitarian migration streams, and the broader profile of migrants described in the reporting is younger than the average Australian, typically 25 to 30 years old, more highly skilled and more educated. That is part of why the fiscal arithmetic works the way it does over a lifetime, even when some categories draw more in services than they contribute in tax.

For now, Taylor is pressing ahead with a politically sharp argument that links veterans’ support, permanent resident payments and border politics into one message. But the numbers already on the table make clear the dispute is not over whether migration has costs — it is over whether those costs outweigh the gains, and Treasury’s answer was no.

For Hollie Hughes and other Coalition figures trying to sell tighter entitlements, that leaves the harder question: how to defend a restriction built around savings when the official modelling says the program pays off for the country as a whole.